An eye pattern or eye diagram is a commonly used diagram type used in measurement devices like oscilloscopes or network analyzers. An eye diagram can also be used for simulating digital transmissions systems. An eye diagram shows a data signal spanning a sequence of symbols transmitted in a physical transmission channel. An eye diagram is a common indicator of the quality of signals transmitted through a transmission channel. An oscilloscope generates an eye diagram by overlaying sweeps of different segments of a long data stream at a clock rate. When many signal transitions of a transmission signal are overlaid positive and negative pulses are superimposed on each other. Overlaying many bits produces the eye diagram, so-called because the resulting image looks like the opening of a human eye.
In a conventional measurement device, the generated eye diagram or eye pattern can be displayed on a screen of the measurement device to an engineer. The engineer can then evaluate a system performance of the transmission system on the basis of the visualized eye diagram. A user may print a screenshot of the eye pattern displayed on the display unit of the measurement device. With a conventional measurement device, it is not possible to perform an automatic analysis of the eye pattern of the measured transmission signal. A user or engineer can interpret the visualized eye diagram to draw conclusions concerning the quality of the transmission channel, however, further processing of the eye diagram to analyze the transmission signal automatically is not possible.
Accordingly, there is a need to provide a measurement device which allows an automatic analysis of an eye pattern of a transmission signal.